Suggestions for collaboration based on hard-won experience

On Tuesday last week I took to the stage at the University of the Sunshine Coast innovation centre for the CAIRSS community day, I talked about seven things we’re doing wrong. By Friday I was in Tokyo, at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in building rejoicing in the name “Tokyo Tech Front” another nice venue. This time I was presenting a similar but more positive list that I put together with Kate Watson, my CAIRSS colleague.

The theme of the conference was Open Access now and in the future, from the global and Asia-Pacific points of view so we put together a summary of where we see Australian university Institutional Repositories, with some suggestions for future collaboration based on our own experience of four years or so of IR development in Australia. This was might first time presenting with a translator, so I was glad that the presentation was relatively simple; I took it one point at a time and paused for the Japanese version.

Jim Downing has written a harvester for CrystalEye. I thought I would have a try and see if I could iterate through all the entries and extract the temperature of the experiment. This is where XML really starts to show its value over legacy formats. Jim’s iterator reads each entry and copies it to a file; I decided to read the entry as an XML document, search for the temperature using XQuery and announce it. It’s simple enough that I thought I could do it while watching Liverpool (I used to live on Merseyside). Unfortunately (or fortunately) the torrent of goals distracted me so it had to wait till today.

The temperature is described in the IUCr dictionary and held in CML as (example):

293.0

So this is trivially locatable by XQuery (with local-name() and @dictRef):

It will take the best part of the day to iterate through the entries, but remember that CrystalEye is not a database. We are converting it to RDF (and anyone interested can also do this) when it can be searched in a trivial amount of time and with much more complex questions. (Remember that CrystalEye was not originally designed as a public resource). Until then anyone who wishes to use CrystalEye a lot would do best to download the entries and build their own index.

[Note: I will continue to try to format the code – WordPress makes it very difficult]

Easy enough to do in ICE – apart from the work I had to do to get the quote formatted correctly. We really need the ability to import HTML properly formatted as a blockquote. This would be very important for PMR, as he likes to quote big chunks, in HTML all you do is wrap <blockqoute> tags around the source for the quote and you’re done. In ICE you have to imply the quote by marking the first paragraph as ‘bq1’ style using our easy-to-click toolbar buttons, then indent the subsequent paragraphs appropriately. We’ll work on automating that.

I used this tip to change my CSS so that stuff in <pre> tags wraps. PMR has used <code> inside a paragraph, not sure what the solution would be there.